Phillips and since then has kept a low public profile, avoiding press interviews and other appearances while meeting with customers around the world and as company teams put the final touches on Infor10.

It's not well-known that some of Infor's most widely used applications, such as Baan and Syteline, had been completely rewritten in recent years, Phillips said in an interview prior to Tuesday's event.

Despite those investments, private equity-backed Infor, which is the third-largest ERP vendor after SAP and Oracle, has had a reputation as more of a holding company for its many acquisitions than a cohesive software vendor with a focused vision.

Infor10 is supposed to change that by tying together Infor's own applications as well as third-party products with a new middleware suite called ION, which is based in part on open-source components.

"Instead of buying a huge middleware suite, we wrote something with the benefit of modern standards," Phillips said. "It comes on three CDs. It takes nine minutes to install."